Figaro Project performs operettas

After a successful first season, The Figaro Project, an opera troupe dedicated to creating performance opportunities for emerging opera singers, is back for more. In a culmination of their second season of performances, they moved away from classical opera this year, and on Friday, premiered a set of three contemporary operas with scores and libretto all by Baltimore-based composers.

The evening began with Paul Mathews’s “Piecing it Apart,” a crime drama about affairs and what happens to those affairs when pregnancies complicate them. The story revolves around Dylan (Andrew Spady) and his secret love affair with Janey (Caitlin Vincent) which ends in a tragedy.

As obvious from the subject material, this was a very emotion-heavy show to start the evening off with, but it hooked the audience and kept them on their toes. One was left with the feeling of wanting to know what would happen next, and although it was an opera, it was as captivating as a spoken show. There wasn’t one actor who didn’t shine as much as the others.

However, the show was performed in a small space, and the actors didn’t have mics. It was hard to understand some of the lyrics in the extremely high soprano arias sung by Vincent, and when she and Spady performed duets, the audience could hardly hear Spady over her.

The tension of this first piece was offset by the second show of the evening, “Lux et Tenebrae” by Douglas Buchanan. This show was much more charming — a creation story about how the world was created by a Child, and the defeat of light over dark.

The actor who stood out was Jason Buckwater, who played three different roles. The characters were all extremely different, but Buckwater was able to differentiate among them not just through his voice, but also in how he stood and the way he held his body. He was especially notable as the Wolf; the way he walked around the stage gave the feeling that he was stalking the Child, and the audience could easily transform him into a four-legged animal despite the fact that he stood on only two legs.

The final show of the evening was a light political comedy to offset the more serious shows. “Strong Like Bull” by Joshua Bornfield centered around 1917 Russia, where liberal lawyer Alexander Kerensky (Nathan Wyatt) and conservative general Lavr Kornilov (Peter Drackley) struggle for power while being manipulated by puppeteer Vladimir Lvov (Jessica Abel).

Wyatt was the star of the show, hilarious when he was stumbling drunk through the audience, allowing the audience to see the lust for power in his eyes. He, like Buckwater, threw himself into his character, and it was clear to everyone watching.

Overall, all the music that evening was extremely “modern,” meaning that for the most part, there was an atonal feel to the whole thing. There wasn’t a melody; one couldn’t walk out humming the songs in any of the operas, except for a few small parts within each show. It worked to represent speech, but was a bit jarring for anyone expecting more melodic lines.

The simple underscoring of a piano (and some strings in “Lux et Tenebrae”) helped to set the scene with music; every time the scene changed, there would be a new mood shift in the music.

The composers have indicated that they are planning further revisions to each of their shows and want to send them out to other opera companies. They will undoubtedly be successful, judging from the reactions by the audience during this first premiere.